My previous blog hosting setup as so:
Cheapest droplet on DigitalOcean ($5 a month, 1TB transfer, 512mb ram, 1 CPU, 20GB SSD) with Anchor CMS installed. With Anchor CMS you also required MySQL and Apache.
There were a few problems with this setup. My blog is a super low traffic site (only my friends go on here to look for things to laugh at me about), why do I need to be running a database, and a dynamic PHP website with the (less efficient than NGINX) apache web server? Also, I’ve been working as an intern developing PHP for over a year now. As much as I appreciate it paying for the next two years of my tuition, I really don’t want to look at it again for the rest of my life.
Things have been busy for the last little while so I’ve been putting migration off. Recently, I started looking up CMS, or blog hosting platforms, Ghost, wordpress (shutters) and the likes. But I’m no ‘professional’ blogger (whatever that means) and wordpress is a black box of PHP mystery-magic. It wasn’t until just a few days ago that I remembered hey, I used to have a blog generated using Jekyll and a hosted on GitHub pages two years ago. (I just checked and that site is still up!) Jekyll is nice and all, but there’s just something about dynamically-typed languages that makes me want to run far, so very far away.
So I had the following requirements: a statically generated site, for simplicity and speed, and hopefully generated using a static site generator written in a statically typed language. If you haven’t already noticed, I like static things. :)
That’s where Hugo comes in. I was browsing /r/golang, and saw a post for release 0.15 for Hugo. I took at look at it and the docs, and was immediately intrigued.
I like Go, it’s a wonderful albeit weird language, seriously, formatting the date for the homepage of this site was unecessarily difficult because instead of passing %Y, %M, %d or something similar, you have to pass the arbitrary(?) date “Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 MST 2006” formatted to your liking…
Anyways, Go is a nice albeit weird language, with a nice albeit weird templating language {{ isset .Lol “what” }} but it’s a language I like, and it’s a good, fast and decently supported statically-typed language.
Hugo on the other hand is a very fast (thanks to Go) static site generator with very good documentation and an active community. It was a winner in my books.
So here I am now, I finally put my bootstrap skills to work, and put font-weight:200; everywhere to create what is the theme of this site; and I like it. Also, now that my blog isn’t an instance of a PHP webapp, I can sleep well at night now, which I also like.